Trust, Who Do Ya? (Apologies to Prince)

by capelesst

In the 90’s pop culture told us to trust no-one. In the 00’s governments, corporations, and major religions were exposed by media (mainstream and otherwise) to be unworthy of the trust many had already withheld. In the 10’s maybe the only people we can trust are the creators.

Go with me a minute. We can’t trust ourselves because we don’t know who we are. Consciousness, Identity, Reality, they’re all abstracts we’ve got workarounds for, but definitive answers? So far… no banana.

We can’t, by extension, trust the authority structures we create because they are composed of us, with our perverse motivations and unfathomable lobes.

We can’t trust in a Higher Power, because most of us (I mean most of the people who’ll ever read this post) were born in a century which witnessed atrocities of faith-defying intensity.

There are no absolutes worthy of total trust. So I propose a conditional trust. Let us trust the creators.

Creators are driven by the closest thing to a divine spark we can fathom, the urge to make. Whatever we think of the results, we can trust that they come from that faraway place where creation began, that some part of it was dragged from the swirling, stinky chaos of potential.

Creators are not the agencies or companies who employ them. I am not suggesting we trust Disney executives or the CEOs of advertising agencies, nor that we mistrust any work that garnered payment. Money is not evil.

But anything created issues a challenge to its non-creators. The challenge is a statement and a question, “Here I am. What do you think?”. Our responses to those challenges add up to life.

Creators, through their creations, offer humanity perpetual possibility. We can trust them to do that even if they’re remarkably similar to the rest of us on all other counts, unfathomable and perverse.